Baruch College’s undergraduate newspaper, The Ticker, has tapped into one of the most rapid methods of information sharing: Live Tweeting. Twitter, already being a “real-time information network” (twitter.com), can be used to immediate disperse information. The Ticker used this method of news reporting at a recent journalism panel at Baruch College, called “The Future of Journalism: a Round Table Discussion.” Here, members of The Ticker posted quotes from panelists right after they were said – and discussion arose on Twitter between those posting as well as people not at the event. Check out the live feed here: https://twitter.com/#!/BaruchTicker

There are new evidence to the case that suggests that the shooting may have been done in self-defense. It was said that a photo was released that shows injury to the back of Zimmerman’s head. There are concerns that this trial will cause conflict between the black and the white community. Already, there are several protests across the country that demand for the conviction of Zimmerman. Celebrities, priests, and other influential peple such as Obama have had their input on this case. In addition, there might be an issue with the media coverage of the case. It seems as if the media was set to condemn Zimmerman from the start, from their use of words and photos in their reports.

I thought this article was interesting because it considers the role of the media during wartime. Should the newspapers protect the American armies’ interests by not exposing photos that can put soldiers at risk? On the other hand, it is important for journalists is to report the truth as it is…

The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Hughes’s purchase of a majority stake in the magazine will be announced on Friday, once again remaking the masthead of the nearly century-old magazine that helped define modern American liberalism.

His focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.

Mr. Hughes, 28, will become publisher and the editor in chief of the magazine, and Richard Just will remain the editor. Martin Peretz, who was editor in chief from 1975 until 2010, when his title was changed to editor in chief emeritus, will become a member of the magazine’s advisory board. The terms of the sale were not disclosed. Mr. Hughes said he was motivated by an interest in “the future of high-quality long-form journalism” and by an instinct that such journalism was a natural fit for tablets. He said he would “expand the amount of rigorous reporting and solid analysis” that the magazine produces.

For Mr. Just, that means an opportunity to hire more writers and editors — an important step for a publication with a total head count of 29. “It’s been a long time. It’s been years” since total head count increased, he said.

The influence of The New Republic has often outstripped its small staff and its small circulation (around 50,000). Founded in 1914 by the political journalist Walter Lippmann, it has long been a part of the liberal movement, counting presidents as readers, including John F. Kennedy, and luminaries as writers, including George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth.

Under Mr. Peretz’s editorship and ownership, the magazine has passionately supported Israel and drawn criticism at times for its pro-war stances. The magazine’s editorials supported the Iraq War in 2003 and later expressed deep regret for doing so.

In recent years, The New Republic has reduced its publication schedule to biweekly from weekly and redesigned its once-staid pages in an effort to modernize its look. It has also sought to find a successful digital strategy, including charging readers to access some parts of its Web site and by introducing an iPad app.

Mr. Hughes said he expected to “revamp the existing iPad and mobile applications so that they’re clearly an investment for the enterprise.”

The magazine is currently owned by a consortium led by Laurence Grafstein, a longtime media banker. Others in the group include the hedge fund manager William A. Ackman and the real estate developer Michael Alter. The investor group teamed up with Mr. Peretz in 2009 to buy The New Republic back from CanWest Global Communications, a Canadian publisher.

The consortium started to contemplate selling the magazine several months ago. At the time, people briefed on the sale process said the owners wanted to find a partner that could help invest in the magazine’s digital transformation, including developing a more robust strategy for social networking and mobile applications.

Mr. Hughes, who was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg’s at Harvard and who ran publicity for Facebook at its outset, quit the company in 2007 and joined Mr. Obama’s campaign, where he ran a social network for the candidate’s supporters. He later founded Jumo, an online hub for charities, which merged less than a year later with GOOD, a publishing company that promotes social action.

Mr. Hughes said he would continue to advise GOOD, but The New Republic would be his priority. He will continue to reside in the Hudson River Valley of New York but will visit the magazine’s office in Washington often.

Mr. Just said that Mr. Hughes “has assured me that I’m going to continue to run the editorial side of the magazine.”

Asked how he would turn a profit for the money-losing magazine, Mr. Hughes said, “Profit per se is not my motive. The reason I’m getting involved here is that I believe in the type of vigorous contextual journalism that we — we in general as a society — need.”

He added that he hoped the magazine could be profitable. “But I’m investing and taking control of The New Republic because of my belief in its mission, not to make it the next Facebook,” he said.

One of the peculiarities of modern conservatism is that the most coruscating examinations of its doctrines are often issued from dissidents within its own ranks. Some of the more recent renegades include the Christian evangelical David Kuo, who served in George W. Bush’s administration; the economist Bruce Bartlett, who was a Reagan administration official; and the commentators Damon Linker and David Frum. But perhaps no one remains a more improbable critic than David Brock.

In the Reagan years, Brock began his career within the neoconservative orbit of The Washington Times. Soon he migrated to The American Spectator, where he became a key figure in the “Arkansas Project,” which was financed by the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and was intended to destroy Bill Clinton’s presidency. In addition, Brock assailed Anita Hill, whom he had earlier deemed “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” in a best-selling book. Then, in the late 1990s, he performed a political somersault. In his riveting 2002 memoir, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” he flayed both himself and his former mentors for toppling into an intellectual and moral cesspool. There the story might have ended. But since then Brock has discovered a new vocation as the founder of Media Matters for America, an organization that seeks to monitor and expose what it sees as conservative misinformation.

In “The Fox Effect,” Brock and his associate Ari Rabin-Havt target Rupert Murdoch’s lucrative flagship cable network, Fox News. They draw on Michael Wolff’s biography of Murdoch as well as on transcripts and leaked memos (some of which Media Matters has already publicized) from Fox journalists and executives to contend that it is not a traditional news organization, but a propaganda outlet intent on reshaping the Republican Party in its own image.

The opening for Fox to make the transition from a right-wing news outlet to a powerful player in the party itself arrived, Brock and Rabin-Havt write, in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama, a presumed radical with an exotic name who didn’t even appear to be a real American. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News and a former campaign operative for Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, “must have been waiting for this moment. . . . Now was his chance to lead a movement — not with his own voice, but, as he had done so effectively in the past, by channeling his political ambitions through others.”

In the first months of Obama’s presidency, Fox reporters and hosts, led by Glenn Beck, steadily misrepresented his aims. The network, the authors say, became “a breeding ground for Republican talking points.” “By denying the president a honeymoon,” they write, “Ailes had set the tone for the rest of Obama’s term.”

They go on to indict Ailes for fomenting the Tea Party movement. Fox News provided what amounted to wall-to-wall coverage of Tea Party gatherings, supporting a Republican campaign vehicle while maintaining the pretense of functioning as an objective news organization. Brock and Rabin-Havt pin much of the blame for the Democrats’ loss in the 2010 midterm elections on Fox, charging that it had “served as the communications hub of the Republican Party” and “used the Tea Parties to build a movement that supplied bodies for the Republican field operation.”

But just how effective has the Fox effect actually been? The network is wildly popular among an older, mostly male conservative cohort, but pushing the movement’s language further to the right has not been an unequivocal political success. Not only was Fox unable to prevent Obama’s election, but it failed to stymie his health care plan. Its record against his re-election campaign in 2012 may well be no better, especially if the economy continues to recover. Yes, Republican stars like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich are, or have been, on the Fox payroll. But it is Mitt Romney — a Massachusetts moderate who, no matter how much he denies it, laid out the lineaments of Obama’s health care plan — who will quite possibly secure the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is running out of steam.

What Brock and Rabin-Havt fail to provide is a context. The Democrats did not suffer losses in the 2010 elections primarily because of nasty commentary on Fox; rather, they dithered on health care reform and were repeatedly outmaneuvered by Republican legislators. Nor do the authors explain what would constitute legitimate criticism of Obama: the left’s frustration with the president, after all, mirrors the right’s in viewing him as a detached elitist deaf to the concerns of common folk. At what point is anger against Obama the product of media manipulation, and at what point the result of spontaneous grievances?

Brock and Rabin-Havt also concentrate so closely on the farrago of conspiratorial nonsense spouted by the likes of Beck that they exaggerate its practical significance. The truth is that Beck, who has departed from Fox, will in the future probably be dimly remembered as part of the freak show — the birthers, the allegations of Kenyan socialism in the White House, and so on — that accompanied Obama’s presidency. If anything, such volatile rhetoric has boomeranged: toward the end of their book, Brock and Rabin-Havt themselves state that “ironically, Ailes’s quest to divide has also damaged the Republican Party” by tarnishing more moderate conservatives. For all the authors’ ­apprehension about the network’s influence, this close study of the Fox universe demonstrates not its reach but the limits of conservative jihadism, something Brock should be more familiar with than anyone else.

According to the attached New York Times article, CNN is interested in buying out Mashable, a popular website “which specializes in stories about technology and social media.” This article says that an acquisition of Mashable, “Would make a statement about CNN’s interest in startups and social media.” As technology advances, major news corporations are having to shift their traditional models to make the news more interesting for generations brought up on technology.

I am part of the media group and one of the things we are looking to discuss is the impact of social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter on how the general public consumes the news and information. The article I have attached is about the man who lived nearby the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s camp. When the entire world was completely in the dark as to what was happening, a man was tweeting the raid from his home and it got some attention. This just shows the power of the world wide web and social networking coming together to share information as it’s happening despite the most covert of missions.

This article, found (online, oddly enough) in the New York Times, shows how the Times is trying to deal with the technological changes that their paper is fighting – and the media, in general. Author Arthur S. Brisbane knows these issues just can’t be avoided anymore:

“The problem is part of a much larger phenomenon. In the current environment, New York Times journalists are empowered to build their own personal following via social networks like Twitter and Facebook, while at the same time the wider audience can use blogs and curation sites to pull content away from The Times.”

This article has a few examples of good ideas to fix this problem – in terms of the papers themselves, at least. Check it out: